Paper delivered at the conference Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences, Hinting at

Interdisciplinarity; 3rd Edition: Figures of Migration, Iai, Romania, 19-20 May, 2016,
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University

Migrating Otherness: Posthumanism and the Rise of Human-Animal Studies

LORELEI CARAMAN1

Abstract:
Classifying the line of separation that humans have placed between themselves and nonhuman animals as
arrogance, in his 1917 paper A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-analysis, Freud speaks about three important
scientific blows given to Mans self-love: the cosmological or Copernican one (the discovery that we are not in the
center of the Universe), the biological or Darwinian one (the discovery that we are not different from animals) and
the psychological or Freudian one (the discovery that we are not the masters of our own minds). Yet, almost a
century after Freud, has humanity really stopped being fascinated with its own image? Is it finally ready to move
towards other than its own otherness? This papers discusses the emerging, rapidly growing and profoundly
interdisciplinary field of human-animal studies in the larger context of the migration from humanism to
posthumanism.

Keywords:
posthumanism, human-animal studies, interdisciplinarity, alterity, nonhuman other

Introduction
In Isaac Bashevis Singers The Letter-Writer, the main character, Herman Gombiner, a Jewish
middle-aged man from Poland whose entire family had been killed by the Nazis during the
Holocaust, works as an editor and lives a reclusive life in New York. One day, a mouse appears
in his book-stacked apartment. To keep it from chewing on the books, he carefully lays out a
little bit of food for her every day. He names the mouse Huldah. At one point during the story,
believing Huldah to be dead, Herman composes a kind of eulogy for her in his head, saying:
What do they knowall those scholars, all those philosophers, all the leaders of the world
about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the
species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with
food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the
animals it is an eternal Treblinka2.
While the contention that in relation to them, all people are Nazis may seem excessively
radical or even antihumanist to some (although, as Anat Pick points out, the National Socialists
1

Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iasi

2 I.B. Singer, The Letter-Writer. The Collected Stories, Penguin Classics, London,
2011, p.311.

Paper delivered at the conference Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences, Hinting at
Interdisciplinarity; 3rd Edition: Figures of Migration, Iai, Romania, 19-20 May, 2016,
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University
were not radically opposed to humanism; the idea of human progress was, in fact, often invoked
by those responsible for the Holocaust3) Hermans question remains a valid one: what do we
indeed know about such as them? Cultural Studies, Feminism, Postcolonialism or even Queer
Studies, have endeavored to explore the question of otherness: the otherness involved in the
perception and representation of race, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. Yet, while all these
facets of human alterity were being considered, one particular other and perhaps the most
other or others, was being, with few exceptions, consistently ignored: the nonhuman other.
This important oversight prompted the emergence of a new scholarly field now commonly
known under the general name of Human-Animal Studies, or H.A.S in its abbreviated form.
What initially started as niche scholarly work has, in recent years, literally boomed into quite a
vast domain of its own: there are not only academic journals dedicated to H.A.S, but also
courses, research groups or networks, book series, conferences and even universities offering
undergraduate degrees in the field. Despite its rapidly growing popularity, it still remains largely
unknown in many academic circles where mentioning this name risks provoking expressions of
puzzlement or even bewilderment. Consequently, in the following we seek to familiarize the
reader with the emergence of Human-Animal Studies, its scope, main directions and basic tenets,
as well as its contribution or involvement in the larger movement towards posthumanism.

Main Body
The first questions that may usually arise in this case are: what exactly is Human-Animal
Studies and how is it connected to the humanities? Are animals not already studied enough by
biologists, ethologists or behaviorists? One of the popular misconceptions is that human-animal
studies focuses only on animals or on studying animals. It is about both humans and animals
(hence the hyphenated name): animals seen and represented through human eyes, but also
humans as they might be seen through animal eyes. Margo DeMello defines it as the exploration
of the spaces that animals occupy in human social and cultural worlds and the interactions
humans have with them4. The key word in this definition is interaction, or as Donna Haraway
puts it, the dance of relating5 between humans and members of other species, the mutuallytransforming becoming-with the other6. If fields such as zoology, ethology or comparative
psychology focus on studying animals per se 7 then human-animal studies explores the points of
intersection or the various encounters between humans and animals, their significance and their
3 A. Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film,
Columbia University Press, New York, 2011, p. 50.
4 M. DeMello, Animals and Society: an Introduction to Human-Animal Studies,
Columbia University Press, New York, 2012, p.4.
5 D. J. Haraway, When Species Meet, Posthumanities, vol.3, University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, 2008, p.25.

Paper delivered at the conference Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences, Hinting at
Interdisciplinarity; 3rd Edition: Figures of Migration, Iai, Romania, 19-20 May, 2016,
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University
representations in fiction, poetry, film, mass-media, philosophy and many other areas (we shall
shortly return to its inter- and multidisciplinarity).
One famous example of such an encounter is that between Derrida (rather Derridas nudity, to be
more specific) and his cat, an encounter which is relayed in his The Animal That Therefore I
Am. He designates the term animalsance to describe the paradoxical feeling of shame
experienced when ones nakedness meets, for instance, the gaze of a cat (paradoxical because, as
he points out, animals are already naked): against the impropriety that comes of finding oneself
naked, one's sex exposed, stark naked before a cat that looks at you without moving, just to see.
The impropriety [malsance] of a certain animal nude before the other animal, from that point on
one might call it a kind of animalsance: the single, incomparable and original experience of the
impropriety that would come from appearing in truth naked, in front of the insistent gaze of the
animal, a benevolent or pitiless gaze, surprised or cognizant. The gaze of a seer, visionary, or
extra-lucid blind person8. Derridas repeated engagement with the question of the animal
(although he warns against using the general term animal which encages all animals,
linguistically, into a single word) has turned him into one of the leading figures in the field of
H.A.S, especially in its posthumanist strand. Another such illustrious human-animal encounter is
recounted by Emanuel Levinas in a short piece called The Name of a Dog or Natural Rights.
Bobby, a stray dubbed by Levinas the last Kantian of Nazi Germany 9, wandered into a
concentration camp. In stark contrast with the human passers-by, including women and children,
who threw disgusted looks at the prisoners, thus deepening their already profound feeling of
dehumanization (although from a posthumanist perspective the term itself is problematic),
Bobby greeted them by wagging his tail. This particular gesture, coming, ironically, from a
nonhuman, made them aware of their own humanity. By wagging his tail and saluting them
with typical doggy friendliness and enthusiasm, Bobby acknowledged them as humans. It was
precisely this version of humanity seen through nonhuman eyes which re-entrusted them to their
own identity. From these two examples one may already see how the scope of this scholarly field
is not limited to the study of animals, but in its analysis of the intersections between humans and
other species, it may yield new perspectives on the human animal as well.

6 Ibid. p.38. The term becoming-with is actually borrowed from Deleuze and
Guattaris Becoming-Animal in A Thousand Plateaus.
7 M. DeMello, Animals and..., qtd. edition., pp. 4-5.
8 J. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow), Critical Inquiry,
vol.28, no.2, 2002, p. 372.
9 E. Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, translated by Sean Hean, Johns
Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1997, p.153.

Paper delivered at the conference Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences, Hinting at
Interdisciplinarity; 3rd Edition: Figures of Migration, Iai, Romania, 19-20 May, 2016,
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University
As DeMello points out, Human-Animal Studies is both interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary,
that is it is a field of study that crosses disciplinary boundaries and is itself composed of several
disciplines10. Not only does it study intersections between animals and humans, but itself lies at
the intersection between various fields from Literary Studies, Linguistics, Philosophy,
Psychology or Film or Media Studies to Gender, Trauma and Disability Studies. DeMello calls it
simply a way of seeing11, and by seeing she means, of course, understanding. HumanAnimal Studies, therefore, supplies us with a way of understanding both ourselves and the other,
including, as we shall see, our own (animal) otherness. It is interesting to note, however, how we
use the term seeing to denote the process of understanding: as humans, we grasp the world
preponderantly with our sense of sight. Drawing from Freuds Civilization and Its Discontents,
Cary Wolfe notes how the repression of mans animality is tied to the privileging of sight over
other senses12. The traditional humanist, he says, finds animals (other) ways of knowing, for
instance a dogs way of perceiving the world primarily through his sense of smell, intimidating
or unnerving13. This is why, to Wolfe, one of the tasks of posthumanist theory is to decenter
the human and the visual from its privileged place as the transcendental signifier to which all
other phenomenological differences are referred for meaning14.
Derridas, Wolfes and Haraways contributions are representative of the posthumanist line of
thought which features prominently in the field of Human-Animal Studies. As Elisabeth
Arnould-Bloomfield shows, the posthumanists rather emphasize the idea of compassion, coming
in contrast with the rationalist, humanist, Enlightenment-based sympathy theory which instead
advocates a justice-and-rights approach15. While the former operates more on the theoretical
level, being heavily influenced by deconstruction, the latter is usually associated with something
known as critical animal studies. Critical Animal Studies, defined by DeMello as an academic
field of study dedicated to the abolition of animal exploitation, oppression, and domination 16 is
generally constructed around animal rights activism. The posthumanists, on the other hand, focus
10 M. DeMello, Animals and..., qtd. edition., p. 7.
11 Ibid. p. 9.
12 C. Wolfe, Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of the Species and
Posthumanist Theory, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2003, p.3.
13 Ibid. p. 4.
14 Ibid. p. 4.
15 E. Arnould-Bloomfield, Posthumanist Compassions, PMLA, vol.130, no.5, 2015,
p.1468.
16 M. DeMello, Animals and Society..., qtd. edition., p. 5.

Paper delivered at the conference Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences, Hinting at
Interdisciplinarity; 3rd Edition: Figures of Migration, Iai, Romania, 19-20 May, 2016,
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University
on the radical otherness of nonhuman animals and the deconstruction of humanist
assumptions still at work in the field of H.A.S17. In other words, they seek to challenge to
Human/Animal binary itself. At the same time, there are variations in the posthumanist camp as
well: for instance, Derridas passivity approach, based on the idea of the impossibility of
comprehending the others pain, diverges from Haraways relational model which focuses on the
human-animal relational dance of interactions18.
If up to this point we have tackled the what (what the field is largely concerned with), we have
barely touched upon the question of why: why (do we need) human-animal studies? The
answer to this question gives us three main possible directions worth exploring. The first reason
is quite simple: we are surrounded by animals. Our lives are packed with animal encounters: in
our homes, on the streets (especially in Romania), in the wild, or in more unfortunate cases, in
zoos or circuses, or in even more unfortunate cases, butchered and served on our plates or turned
into things that we wear. The history of the evolution of mankind itself is built on the backs of
animals, who have diligently served as means of transportation, food, clothing, entertainment
or protection. The ignored alterity of animals is not only a radical otherness, but also a pervasive
one: it can be observed everywhere, being far more widespread than any facet of human alterity.
The fact that it was disregarded for so long points to the insufficiencies of both cultural studies in
particular and humanism in general.
The second reason for Human-Animal Studies is that when we re-examine animals, we must reexamine our treatment of and encounters with them and this, in turn, forces us to re-examine
ourselves, both as individuals and as a species. As DeMello shows, even the definition of the
categories human and animal is problematic. To define animal, one must define human
and paradoxically enough, human is generally defined as not animal, even though the human
is also an animal19. In this sense, as Kenneth Shapiro points out, the name human-animal
studies is essentially a misnomer, since humans are already animals; it is as if one said
tomatoes and vegetables20. Basically, the second reason for Human-Animal Studies is that we
are animals ourselves, albeit ones that, as we know from Freud, repress their own animality. To
exist in human society we must relinquish the animal in us, although a complete renunciation is
impossible. This repression is so powerful that Freud lists it as one of motivations behind the
resistance to both Darwins theory and psychoanalysis: powerful human feelings are hurt by the
subject matter of the theory. Darwins theory of descent met with the same fate, since it tore
17 E. Arnould-Bloomfield, Posthumanist Compassions, qtd. edition., p.1468.
18 Ibid. pp. 1467-1476.
19 M. DeMello, Animals and Society..., qtd. edition., p. 15.
20 K. Shapiro, Human-Animal Studies: Growing the Field, Applying the Field, Animals
and Society Institute, Ann Arbor, 2008, p.7

Paper delivered at the conference Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences, Hinting at
Interdisciplinarity; 3rd Edition: Figures of Migration, Iai, Romania, 19-20 May, 2016,
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University
down the barrier that had been arrogantly set up between man and beasts 21. In children, he
observes, the line of separation between humans and animals is very thin or even almost
nonexistent as they do not as yet recognize or, at any rate, lay such exaggerated stress upon the
gulf that separates human beings from the animal world. In their eyes, the grown man, the object
of their fear and admiration, still belongs to the same category as the big animal 22. Drawing
from a passage in Freuds Totem and Taboo, Norman Doidge uses the term animalphilic
stage23 to refer to childrens ease, but also fascination with animals which is evident, for
instance, in cartoons, toys or superheroes that usually have animal features.
If the second reason is provided by our own repressed animality, which although part of
ourselves is pushed into an otherness, as Freud would say, from without, the third reason for
Human-Animal Studies is the need to challenge, not only that exaggerated line of separation
between humans and animals, but also the absolute centrality and supremacy of Man itself. In
other words, the question is not only what do we know about such as them? but also how can
we truly know about such them if the preexistent premise is that we are better, more deserving
than them? Whether a complete deconstruction of anthropocentrism is possible or not is
debatable; what is certain, however, is that it cannot take place within the confines of humanism.
As Cary Wolfe indicates, to continue to work within the humanistic framework, even when
analyzing animals, is by definition to continue to be anthropocentric. While liberal humanism
may become inclusive of previously marginalized groups, it cannot question or destabilize
the schema of the human who undertakes such pluralization24.

Conclusion
The current migration from humanism to posthumanism has opened to possibility for new
interdisciplinary fields such as Human-Animal Studies to appear on the academic scene. As
outlined above, H.A.S and H.A.S-related works strive to challenge the idea of anthropocentrism
(wherever it appears: whether in language, philosophy, psychology, theology, history or
literature), to deconstruct the deeply-embedded human/animal binary, to bring novel perspectives
21 S. Freud, The Resistances to Psycho-analysis. The Standard Edition of the
Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, Vintage Books, London, 2001, p. 221.
22 S. Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety. The Standard Edition of the
Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 20, Vintage Books, London, 2001, p. 103.
23 N.R. Doidge, Dreams of Animals in Cultural Zoo: Animals in the Human Mind
and Its Sublimation, Karnac Books, London, 2014, p. 54.
24 C. Wolfe, What is Posthumanism? Posthumanities vol. 8, University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, 2010, p. 134.

Paper delivered at the conference Perspectives in Humanities and Social Sciences, Hinting at
Interdisciplinarity; 3rd Edition: Figures of Migration, Iai, Romania, 19-20 May, 2016,
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University
on the intricate relations between human and nonhuman animals, to re-examine the
representations of these relationships in various other fields including and especially the arts, as
well as to shed new light on the more general process of othering, whether it refers to the
othering of nonhuman animals or the othering of our own human animality.

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